Pulse
by An abundance of squids
Summary: Sometimes, the burden of maintaining a pulse becomes too much, be it the pulse of a single man or the pulse of a team. Sometimes, you need to step back and take a pause to look at who you really are. And then sometimes, you just need to collapse.


For a single second, there was an almost silence. A silence broken not by speech or gunfire, but by a long, continuous and monotonic beep.

It was but one noise, but it was the one the doctor hated the most. He hated it more than the voices and the accents that mangled his name and his job into a single cry of desperation and hope, a cry to which he couldn't respond to, hated it more than the sirens at even now still dominated his life, hated it more than the whispers behind his back, questioning who he was and who he wasn't.

he hated that noise. More than anything in the world.

It was the sound of failure.

A failure that even after decades of being a doctor, still happened. A failure that was beyond his control still.

He sighed and turned away from the corpse, the body that until so recently, had held a pulse.

He shouldn't be feeling anything. He really shouldn't. Nothing would come of this. Nothing had been lost.

After all, you couldn't lose what had never existed in the first place.

You couldn't lose what you had lost years ago.

But yet, but yet he couldn't help but sigh in regret and feel something.

For despite all his proclamations, he was only human.

Switching off the EKG machine and its proclamation of death, he let out a long, heavy breath and leaned back against the infirmary wall. No one had died. They were immortal here – whatever sense of humanity and mortality had been sucked from all of them the instant they had stepped foot into the cursed limbo of the gravel wars. They would all die, but then be sucked back into reality, only to laugh off their death and repeat it all again.

But still, it hurt a little to lose someone. And no amount of respawn could change that.

He was still human, somewhere deep down, below all the indifference and the twisted ideals that made up his psyche, he still felt the regret and guilt of letting someone die. It was a small part of him, clouded by war and death and an acceptance of what was to come, but it still somehow shone through weakly.

Removing his bloodstained gloves, the doctor took of his glasses and put a hand to his head, covering his face. There were no tears on it.

He wasn't human enough for that.

He turned his head to the side, half-focused eyes falling to the room's window. The desert outside was stained a deep indigo, the only source of light on the featureless new mexican plane being the silvery light of the moon and stars, their weak light doing nothing to break through the dark void beyond the lit confines of the base.

Forcing his eyes to focus, he turned his gaze from the lands beyond to the window itself, where his reflection was visible.

It looked the same as it ever had – a pale, almost white face framed by dark brown hair and a pair of matching brown eyes with heavy rings caused by countless sleepless nights and countless restless days. A face cold and unforgiving as his treatments and his remedies

And if he squinted, if he tried enough, he could see the face of the youth that he had once been. The face of an idealistic youth, going to war with the red, black and white band of his country on one arm and the white and red one of his job on the other. a real war, not just this sick parody of one he was in now, not to kill but to heal. Going in with the sole intention of making a few less men go back to their parents and children and lovers in boxes.

And then he could see the face of the face of another man, one who was barely months older, but somehow seemed years wiser. The face of the man he had been when the first person had died.

He still remembered it. He still remembered it with such clarity that it was almost terrifying at times. Standing there, a pale hand still holding the wrist of a dying man as slowly, his pulse slowing and weakening...

...until finally, it had stopped.

He had lost something that day. Not his innocence – he had lost that in a patriotic fervor the day he had stepped off the train into Berlin; Not his idealism – that had been worn away over the course of years, leaving him the empty husk of desperation and bitterness he was now.

But it had taken something.

And then looking closer, closer to the present, he saw the desperate face of the man who had somehow landed this job, that crop of brown hair in a shabby mess and with eyes wild with desperation as he tried to find a way to cheat and reverse death, his pale arms lined with golden veins, stained from years of australium abuse.

His arms were still stained, golden veins twisting in and out through his flesh just below the surface of his skin, serving as an everlasting reminder of his darker years.

And then, he saw himself again. Himself as he was now, eyes dry and expression cold as he stood alone in his lab, his only companion being the slowly fading corpse of one of his colleagues, their body cold and dead and lifeless without a pulse to sustain them. The cold hard face of a veteran that had seen too much, the gaze of a man that sometimes never focused on anything, instead just staring straight ahead, his mind still trapped in what he had seen and the harsh mind who had seen what man could do at his worst and how that every one of his actions were all useless in the end.

He could see the soulless husk he had become, and he hated it.

Once upon a time, when he had been but a child from the countryside, he had wanted to help. He had wanted to help, not because he was being paid a seven figure salary to do so or because it was his duty, but because it was right.

But just because it was right hadn't meant it had been for the best, he knew.

It had been that attitude that had gotten him ensnared into a war that would forever stain his history, it was that attitude that had sent into an Australium fueled spiral of addiction and irreversible madness and it was that attitude that had gotten him a job here in this madhouse, where they had taken everything he was and represented and burned it to the ground.

And it was the attitude that he swore would be the death of him someday.

And where had it gotten him? A job in this sick joke a war that twisted everything he and his job stood for and represented into an unrecognisable mess.

He turned away.

He didn't have time for this. He had to get back to work. He had forms to fill out, and then he had to check back up on the patient when they respawned and then…

...and then there would be something else. Someone would break an arm or one of the smokers would come down with lung cancer again or one of the million other things that went medically wrong with his team. And then something else would happen. And then something else. And then on until the team disbanded or until he died for real.

Standing up straight again, he moved from the lifeless corpse to his desk. He didn't have any time for this, for reflection or for remembrance. He had to do his job.

He had to do his job.

Because that's all he was now, wasn't it? He wasn't the man who had survived years of war and destruction. He wasn't a man with hopes or ideals or anything anymore.

He was merely a class. Just like everyone else in this god-forsaken place. He wasn't anyone anymore. He wasn't Josef anymore.

He was just The Medic. Not _a_ medic. _The_ Medic. As if that title was all he was, as if it was all he ever was.

It was if their titles were all they ever were; from himself to the person lying dead on his operating table to the lady who ran this entire operation, They were all soulless husks of the men and women they had once been, merely puppets to a century old conspiracy.

And like everyone else here, he had a job to do.

And that's what made his failure even harsher. This was all he was, and yet he couldn't even do that. Even though they never died, he was still The Medic. He was the man who was meant to maintain the pulse, not of just the individuals who he looked after, but the pulse of the team.

 _He couldn't fail._

He sat down, his torn and bloodstained lab coat settling around him, hiding his form as he collapsed onto the chair.

He was tired. He wanted to slide down onto the floor and sleep for a week. He wanted to forget about his job and his team for a week, take a week to get out of this godforsaken desert and to remember who he was.

But he couldn't. He couldn't leave. They wouldn't let him. And even if he did, he would still have to return back here at some point.

But despite all his bitterness, his warped mind still somehow found humor in it all.

He was a _doctor_. He wasn't meant to be out here, ending lives with a bonesaw in one hand a grin on his face. He wasn't meant to be looking on while another pulse, another life faded away with his only concern being how long until respawn. In his time here, he had ended more lives than saved. He had conducted experiments on his own teammates that would of make Mengele proud.

Something deep inside him snapped, and before he could stop himself, he laughed.

Is this all he was now? A doctor who had long forgotten his oath, turning instead to methods that couldn't be called science by any stretch of imagination? A desperate man playing god in the vain hope that he could stop the inevitable? A madman who had lost everything he had ever stood for and believed in?

It was a laugh void of mirth or humor. It was the laugh of a man who was on the last dregs of his sanity, whose limits had been pushed to the uttermost breaking point.

Finally, his spine gave way and his head landed with a solid 'thunk' onto his paper covered desk.

Why was loosing someone so hard?

He had seen a hundred men die before, some by his hand even. Hell, it wasn't like the man was gone forever. He should of been desensitized to it by now, just as how he was numb to the screams of pain that haunted his lab and the battlefield.

Slowly, the laughter that had suddenly gripped him eased and he was left face down on his desk. His face was wet and some part of him still sane enough for coherent thought realised he had been crying.

Perhaps he was still human enough after all.

And then suddenly, the room was silent again.

Silent but for the barely audible beat of his own pulse.


End file.
